What Happens When Finance Meets Sales

The Zoho Finance - Zoho CRM integration first kicked a few years ago, with the sole purpose of providing sales and finance teams with an integrated platform to work on. While customer sales activities were available only in CRM, customers' transaction data was locked away where only the Finance team could see it, and getting a 360-degree view of the customer data was no easy task. Sharing information between these teams had always been difficult and painful — which is exactly what the integration sought to eliminate.

The big bang

Our original integration automatically fetched new contacts added in Zoho CRM to Zoho Books. With the next phase, we saw sales folks easily record transactions from within Zoho CRM. They could create estimates, invoices, sales orders or purchase orders from Zoho CRM as soon as a sale was made, without having to juggle between apps. If customer activity happened offline, the sales team could easily update the transaction status manually from Zoho CRM. That ease of use also extended to online activities, with the integration automatically updating transaction status based on customer activity. Winning a new deal would automatically mark the estimate as accepted, giving the Finance team auto-populated invoices to send to the client without having to re-enter the details.

With businesses venturing into new areas, the scope for collaboration also increased, so we went ahead and made the integration even better. The new and enhanced integration allows sales and customer relations teams to gather information from multiple departments, like Operations, Finance, and Administration, to make quicker and better decisions. So what could the enhanced integration mean for your business?

Stock information from within your sales platform

If your sales team is about to close a deal, they'll need to know about the stock on hand. With the Zoho Inventory - Zoho CRM integration, stock information is embedded right into Zoho CRM, eliminating the need to call or email the operations team to check on the availability of stock. If orders are placed over the phone, the sales team can record transactions from within Zoho CRM and the numbers will automatically adjust in Zoho Inventory.

Now let’s say that a customer contacts you regarding the status of his latest order. With Zoho Inventory and Zoho CRM integrated, your sales rep can fetch details like the order contents, shipment in progress, and outstanding balance, without needing to trawl through different apps or put the customer on hold. Because your sales and finance platforms are integrated, your sales rep can find all of the issues that are getting in the way of the customer’s satisfaction: in this case, an old shipping address and a past-due balance that the customer had forgotten to pay on time. With a few minutes of conversation, your sales rep can update the shipping address across the entire platform, let the customer know exactly what he needs to pay, and get the delayed order on its way to the right address. It’s good customer service in action, which means more loyal customers and a future of repeat sales.

With transactions recorded from Zoho CRM updated in the Inventory platform as well, the Finance team can analyze customer behavior, create reports for the top-selling items, then analyze stock levels and work on replenishing the stock at hand. Convenient? We think so!

Know how profitable the deal is

Sales teams practically live in CRM, and being able to create expenses and expense reports from Zoho CRM would make things much easier for them. With Zoho Expense Reports available within CRM, your sales team can analyze closed deals and see how profitable each deal actually was. A custom dashboard based on expense reports can keep your sales team up-to-date about their recent deal outcomes and help them decide how to focus their efforts. By bringing reports and analysis into the sales platform, the Zoho Expense - CRM integration gives your team the best information right where they are, so they don't have to bounce around between applications.

Subscription-based business? No problem!

It's no secret that selling to your existing customers is more profitable than acquiring new ones. With subscription-based businesses, there is always the possibility that at some point, the customers may lose interest and start thinking about ending their subscriptions. When this happens, providing personalized discounts and offers along with great customer support can help you retain your customers. With the Zoho Subscriptions - Zoho CRM integration, your sales rep can see a complete overview of the subscriber's activity at the time of negotiation. The neat breakdown of transaction history, subscription renewal dates and invoices under each account lets the salesperson offer customers personalized discounts without risking offering generous plans to delinquent customers.

Zoho Finance with this latest integration, keeps your sales and finance platforms in sync and save yourself the trouble of double data entry. You can even use the time you saved to acquire new leads. After all, what happens in the Finance apps, doesn't have to stay only within the Finance apps, if it could mean more business.

Give the integration a spin and let us know your thoughts.